Botanical tattoo of pink peony, purple lisianthus and crocus flowers with leaves and berries on a calf, in a coloured, lightly shaded style.

Botanical flower bouquet on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of flowers climbs the lower leg, dominated by a large pink peony with a red and yellow centre, with purple lisianthus, crocuses, a peach poppy, sprigs of red berries and a cream seed pod. The flowers are outlined in dark ink and shaded with soft gradients that give them a watercolour-like finish, set against green leaves. The design is framed by a bare leg and foot, with a blurred dark fence and jeans in the background.

Botanical Calf Peony Poppy Flower Berry Seed pod Leaves Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody declares a peony. I told Mrs Adair that at seven in the morning, when the lorry from Calais had been idling behind her hatchback for twenty minutes and the rain was coming in sideways off the estuary. She had a bundle on the passenger seat, pink as a boiled sweet, wrapped in a damp tea towel, and she was already apologising before I'd lifted the corner.

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It wasn't the peony that caught my eye, though. It was the bulbs in a yoghurt pot, the wrinkled seed pod the colour of old piano keys, and a paper twist of something red and berried that rattled when I tipped it. She had cuttings and seeds from her father's allotment outside Lille, she said, and she meant to plant them at her sister's in Suffolk before the frost came. I asked whether any of it was for sale. She laughed and said her father would have had me arrested for asking.

I made her fill in the form anyway. Under purpose of importation she wrote, in careful capitals, FOR MY SISTER, and under plant material she wrote nothing at all, so I wrote it for her. Then I stamped it, and the stamp left a faint blue ghost on the back of my hand that didn't wash off until Tuesday.

When she had gone, I found a single crocus petal stuck to the perspex of my booth, lilac and crumpled, where her sleeve must have brushed it. I didn't throw it away. I pinned it to the corkboard above the kettle, beside the rota and a postcard of a lighthouse, and it was still there in March when the peonies on the verge outside the depot had finally come up.